Why should you build a following on social media tools like Facebook and Twitter? Facebook and Twitter are known as the top two social networking tools around and can help you and your business in many ways, such as SEO, relationship building, viral marketing, and brand visibility. How can you use them to your advantage in business?
Your customers are using these tools. Your competitions’ customers are using these tools. If you use them to your advantage, you could find great new sources of traffic as well as build stronger relationships with your clients.
Step 1: Build a Following
Social media works best when people pay attention to your activity. Having a following will help you have a direct line of communication with a potentially profitable audience. Your following could include customers, prospective customers, strategic partners, and in an indirect way --- search engines. All that you do on the social sites could be noticed by your audience. This could help you drive traffic to your sites, inspire action by your followers, help you build visibility for your brand, and could even help you with search engine optimization. SEO could bring you increased organic traffic down the line.
To build a following, you need to engage people. On Twitter, you should follow them. Put Facebook and Twitter badges on your website and blog. Be follow-worthy. On Twitter, by following others you can most times get a follow-back, particularly if you appear interesting or relevant to the follower.
Step 2: Start Talking
Your Facebook and Twitter accounts are only good if you leverage them well. This means that you need to talk to your followers. Yes, you should be promotional at times but you should also bring interesting information their way and be receptive to their feedback. When you post on Facebook, for instance, your comments will turn up in the feed of all your followers. When people reply or hit a thumbs up, all the people on their list of followers could see the activity and interest could be piqued. Make it count to attract maximum attention and make it useful, otherwise you could get de-friended or flagged as a spammer.
Try to think about things that would appeal to your followers and be sure to answer queries that come in as well.
Step 3: Direct People to These Tools Wherever Possible
Send your Facebook fans to your Twitter feed. Send your Twitter followers to your Facebook page. Send people from your blog to your Facebook and Twitter pages. Mention your Facebook and Twitter accounts on press releases, and so on. This will increase your followers / fans on these pages.
Step 4: Direct People on These Tools Back to your Site Wherever it Makes Sense
When you write a great blog post, release a news item, introduce a new product or promotion, or do something else where you can direct people back to your site, do so in your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This will help you drive traffic and attention to your website and this could help you create buzz and make more sales.
Other Facebook and Twitter Tips:
- Spread out your posting. Don’t concentrate on a mass amount of updates at once.
- Consider using automation tools that can be added to your website to automatically post on social media sites and use tools that let you post in advance.
- Check out some of your competitors on these sites. Their usage could give you tips of what to do and of what not to do.
- Check your website statistics regularly to see where your traffic is coming from. This can help you determine where to spend the bulk of your social media time and budget.
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